by Tom Keneally
To many in Frank’s congregation, meanwhile, the African National Congress were godless communists, and some would feel after his Mass either the moral duty or the small-minded malice to write to the cardinal archbishop about controversial Father Docherty.
The Sunday night before the foreshadowed birth control encyclical was at last released, Leo came to tea. As I’ve said, my brother was more sacerdotal, priestly in the accustomed way, than someone like Frank. Leo reminded us of our Uncle Flynn, who had been a real-estate agent in the Eastern Suburbs, and had the same Irish guff. Nor was Leo free of vanity – or at least he had a different kind of vanity than a man as worldly and yet ingenuous as Father Docherty.
That Sunday evening after our three children had been put to bed, the question was, would the Pope give his blessings to the new contraceptive pill?
‘I tell you, Leo, women are ready for it,’ I ventured.
‘Well, not all women,’ said my brother with his smooth casuistry. ‘Not women past their time. Not Aunty Patsy.’
I see now that the question weighed lightly on him. But he said then, ‘I know it would be of great comfort to many women if he did accept its use. But he has faith and tradition to take account of.’
‘Either way, John XXIII would certainly have let contraception through.’
‘How can you know that?’ my brother asked.
‘Because he recognised that our lives now are drastically different from those of medieval peasants who had to repopulate Europe after the Black Death.’
‘I’ve never heard that argument,’ he said with an air of exceeding, yet perhaps tender, patronage.
But then I asked the real question, the one that covered all eventualities. ‘What of individual conscience?’ I asked it almost as an experiment. ‘Can individual conscience ever trump a papal encyclical?’
To give him credit, he did not mind being quizzed like this. It was something he was used to from me. He would come home from the seminary full of his clerical pomposity and I would challenge it as a younger sister should.
He asked me the question I had been all too ready to ask myself. ‘How can we separate genuine conscience from our expedient and selfish wishes?’
I asked, ‘How can the Pope himself, for that matter?’
‘The Pope can because he’s directed by divine wisdom. You’re lucky you didn’t ask the nuns that question when you were a kid.’
Damian, who had been silent, said, ‘I hope, Leo, the poor bloody women get some genuine mercy out of this.’
‘Oh, Damian,’ warned my brother memorably. ‘There are questions of sexual morality. And then there is mercy. As we all know, they don’t necessarily coincide.’
Later, when Leo had driven off and we were getting ready for bed, I said to Damian, ‘He can jump either way, whatever the Pope says.’
He answered, ‘I still can’t tell which way he himself expects the axe to fall.’
We slept naked, as modern people did. We wanted to be modern because that was our world. We wanted to be Catholic because, in an even more intimate sense, that was our world as well.
In the middle of the northern summer of that year, in Rome – or in Castel Gandolfo, where the Pope had his summer residence overlooking the lake – the word of the Lord, or of the Pope, came. It was the headline in the Herald on 26 July 1968. The edict itself was dated the day before, but we lived on the other side of the timeline and Europe was hours behind us, or as Damian liked to say, ‘We’re twelve hours ahead and a hundred years behind.’
We were clubbed by the headline. Pope Paul VI had forbidden any method of contraception but abstinence and the dreary, unwieldy rhythm business.
I surprised myself, for amongst my sadness I felt an immediate rebellion. I found out later this had been the reaction of many women. The news would cause people to leave the Church, but amongst those who did not it gave a salutary lesson in the limits of papal authority. The tendency to rebellion would be railed against by churchmen, but since that day it has proved to be irreversible − at least in the West, with which we Australians, though in the far south of the world, nonetheless like to associate ourselves.
It seemed the Pope had moved in and reassumed the moral globe. There were people who praised the fact and saw the encyclical as a long-overdue curb on contemporary influence. The urbane Cardinal Suenens of Belgium had reacted like me and said, ‘I beg you, my brothers, let’s not have another Galileo affair. One is enough for the Church.’ Humanae Vitae, he warned, was an unscientific mistake on the scale of the Vatican’s dealings with Galileo, and it was a comfort to me that in the far north of the earth such a warning was sounded.
American and other bishops howled too, foreseeing the reaction from their flock, and were affronted that they had been invited to the Vatican to have their collegial say, yet much of what they had said had been ignored. Some Canadian bishops pushed the idea that the encyclical was only one of many authorities to be followed in this matter. Those who did not agree with it, they said, and who used modern contraception at the sanction of their own conscience, should not be separated from the Church.
I realise now that Humanae Vitae was not only a prohibition laid down on women. It was a prohibition against looking at the world in a new way. All the wisdom and liberal spirit of John XXIII’s Vatican Council seemed to have been quenched at a stroke. Pope John had given us citizenship of the world, and – despite the fact I had gone to the confessional and doubted my judgement – we had taken the liberties he had foreshadowed and looked on ourselves anew. And now there were no more diverse voices. The old world of a sole commanding voice was back, and I found that, to an extent I could not have predicted, I did not want it back. However, as if from ancestral conditioning, I simultaneously felt I was bound by the encyclical, with its neutral language of serene authority.
I read reprinted paragraphs in the newspaper that morning while our three children were eating. Niall, dressed in his convent-blue shirt and navy-blue pants, and Rosie in her virgin-blue uniform were ready for school. Damian offered sensible advice about staying calm until I had read the whole thing in the Catholic Weekly, that staid old rag that would be sure to reprint it in its entirety. But I could not imagine how the paragraphs I’d read in the Herald could be saved by any qualifying clauses packed away in other passages. I looked at combative Rosie, a kindergarten child, in her confident blondeness, which she got from my husband (had a Viking had some input into the genetics of Damian’s Celtic forebears?) and I felt a pulse of weight tug at my heart. Rosie would be subject to this edict one day, too. Should I take her out of that blue uniform and send her to a vigorous secular school, deliver her from the burden of so-called faith?
When Damian sat down to breakfast, he began to read the reports and I saw him growing angrier. He knew he had to go into the Department of Health, where he was working in those years, and be teased by his peers at this latest display of papal authority. Eventually he turned on me as if I were the cause of his outrage.
‘I hope your brother enjoys reading this,’ he said.
‘What’s it got to do with my brother?’ I asked him.
‘I bet my bottom dollar he’ll be quietly pleased. Gleeful in that smarmy way. More interested in denial than giving humans permission.’
‘Even if it were true, is that my fault?’
He returned his eyes to the page and I thought that it was probably true. Leo was happiest to have rules clear, defined and enforceable. He had been like that since childhood.
I put the kids in the car and Damian was with me – I was to take him to the station. We were silent, but when we had delivered Niall and Rosie to their classes, and with Joe asleep in the back seat, we were pleased we had time to talk, as if it could mitigate the facts.
‘Sorry about what I said about Leo. Even though …’
‘Yet it was Leo who sent me to that Father Docherty,’ I reminded him. Why had Leo done that? Had he perceived me as a potential rebel and chosen Frank because at l
east Frank was a priest and could permit an innocent play of ideas, now to be put aside given that the authoritative word had come down?
‘He might have done it because he loves you and wants to see the rules softened for his little sister,’ Damian decided, with perhaps too much charity.
Then his rage was back, centred on the question itself, not on me or my brother. I put out my left hand and touched his wrist.
‘What does the Pope think,’ he asked, ‘when priests masturbate? Isn’t that contraception?’
It was a shocking question – it had been the unspeakable sin during our adolescence.
‘Does he think that is birth control?’ he persisted. ‘Because when you put the old fella in your hand, there’s no possibility of conception!’
‘How do you know priests even do that?’
‘I know because they are human. Only the ones who are inhuman don’t.’ And he smiled. ‘Or the liars. If the Pope himself hasn’t ever done it, it goes to show why he’d write such a grotesque document.’
He looked at me sharply. ‘I’m not kidding. There are genuinely asexual personalities, and they’re always messed up with politics, the military or the clergy, which are perfect for them. Perhaps the Pope …’
‘For God’s sake don’t say that when they tease you at work.’
‘It’s getting to a stage where my friends don’t have to try too hard to make the Church look ridiculous.’
‘Just the same, we should wait,’ I said, finding myself the voice of moderation now because I was scared of Damian’s rage. ‘As you say, we haven’t read it in full. There may be something there …’
‘There’s something there all right. They want us to go back to married celibacy. It would have been more merciful if I’d been a monk, and as for you …’
I rang my brother during the day but he was not in. Later he called back. ‘I know what you want to talk to me about,’ he said. ‘I think we should read it in full first, and I haven’t had a chance.’
‘I said that to Damian.’
‘It isn’t the first time people have been dismayed by the Vatican. I think we were all expecting too much.’
I felt a sting of anger. ‘What would you tell a woman with eight children, married to a labourer and suffering from hypoglycaemia?’
Leo said, ‘Maureen, you find me a woman in that situation in your parish and then I can answer the question.’
‘Please,’ I begged him, ‘don’t be a casuist today.’
‘All right. The Pope has enunciated a principle of faith and there are few exemptions from such a principle. And that’s all I can tell you. Let’s read the thing.’
We were horrified to see on the ABC that night my gynaecologist, a bland man, courtly with women, a flatterer of the bravery of pregnant women, being an apologist for the encyclical; acknowledging that Catholic women would need to go back to the rhythm method, and accept as God’s will the child who was born due to the method’s significant inaccuracies.
‘I wish I had an outstanding bill from that bastard,’ Damian told me. ‘I wouldn’t bloody pay it.’
The man’s hands had delivered my three children and had suddenly declared himself – against us, for us? I felt against, but couldn’t be sure. It depended on who the us was. Everything was in the air.
After I had Joe, I had to go into a rest home for ten days and be knocked out by sedation, displaying a weakness that was beyond the understanding of my mother, who had begotten six and lost two in infancy, and who had somehow absorbed her grief in making jury-rigged clothes and scraping together enough food for us.
To ensure this collapse did not happen again, I spent the better part of two years on the Pill, at the urging of our GP. I had my confidence back, I’d had no troubles, I had taken the Pill for what I thought of as a sensible length of time. I think the reason Damian was furious was that my brief illness had so frightened him, and he wanted to protect me, and the Pill had been a valid way I could protect myself. Now, given that the encyclical invoked eternal truths, our options – taken with a certain subjective wisdom – were dammed.
So it was in a lather of conscience that I approached the full text of the encyclical. To give it its due, it did not read like an arrogant document. Inevitably it began with a florid greeting, but it acknowledged medical changes in past years. It acknowledged that there were differences of opinion amongst the papal commission, some members of which were married couples.
In those opening passages a phantom hope revived in me that Pope Paul was actually going to say yes, regulate your conception according to the new technology, while praying for ancient wisdom. But then slowly he invoked the natural law and said it was immutable. For the natural law was also God’s law, and God’s law, as passed down by the Church under its divine mandate, was that nothing artificial was to come between man and woman.
The argument about sex between couples who could not have a child, the sterile or the aged – that was also dealt with. No unnatural means should be used, and no contraceptive methods of lovemaking, such as ejaculating outside the womb, were permitted. All sexual cunning and sexual technology were ruled out. Then the utterances grew a little crazy. Paul VI called on scientists to turn their attention to researching the natural rhythms, for they allowed a form of contraception that gave no offence to the laws of the universe. The encyclical seemed to have cut off all excuses and all choice.
17
Docherty Meets the Bereaved Mother
July 1996
Damian picked up Docherty from the monastery the next afternoon. He drove them both back to the Breslins’ house to collect a solemn Maureen. She seemed grievously reconciled to this task − of urging Liz to instigate some sort of investigation, even an internal Church inquiry, into her brother’s guilt or innocence.
Damian dropped Maureen and Frank at the Cosgroves’ and said he would wait in the car. Liz’s house was on a downhill slope, and framing its door were large honest grevilleas full of winter birds discussing the wonder of near year-round nectar. Docherty knocked and when Liz appeared in the doorway she stood there, mute, not seeming to recognise him.
‘What does this mean?’ she asked, staring at Maureen. Docherty was shocked at how much older she looked than the young woman who had gathered the group to take part in Vietnam and anti-apartheid demonstrations with him; her features austere as if from a lack of interest in life.
‘I wanted to discuss Stephen’s suicide note,’ said Maureen, jumping straight to the point. ‘I feel dreadful about it, and I think the matter must be pursued, even if it’s my brother.’
‘And who is this man with you?’
‘You know, Liz. It’s our friend Frank Docherty. Father Frank. He’s visiting from Canada.’
‘I do remember,’ she said listlessly. ‘My drunken husband accused me of foisting you on him. You couldn’t help him though. The clergy haven’t been any sort of blessing to us. So, I know where this is going, don’t I?’
‘He’s an expert,’ said Maureen as fast as she could get it out, ‘on the sort of abuse your son said he suffered.’
‘So am I,’ said Liz.
She had no peace, no means of approaching and engaging her grief, and Docherty felt the familiar anger emanating from her. He did not generally encounter it three times in a week, yet he had come home to find it in familiar suburbs where he had expected to have a holiday from it all.
‘Liz,’ he said, ‘your loss is terrible. But Maureen and I believe you should take the note to the cardinal. In case it’s true … Maureen couldn’t feel more grief for your son.’
‘Yes,’ said Liz, her hands hugging her own upper arms and trembling, and still not inviting them in. ‘Yes, in case it’s true. Because the dying always make up stories, don’t they?’
‘Not this sort of story,’ Docherty assured her. ‘Not usually.’
‘I’m fully prepared to admit,’ Maureen declared, ‘that it may be the truth.’
Still they were not invited to e
nter the house.
‘My advice,’ Docherty persisted, ‘for what it’s worth, is that you give your son’s letter to the archdiocese. To alert them. Because there might be others. It’s painful for Maureen to accept there might be, but she recognises the necessity. It is a hard document to dismiss. But through it your son can allay the suffering of other victims.’
‘Do you think they’d act on his letter?’ she asked. ‘The cardinal? I don’t believe it. I don’t want to test it.’
‘I would certainly urge Cardinal Condon to act.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Liz. ‘Face it: they’ll do nothing. They’d rather save the monsignor than listen to my son. Where have you people been living, that you believe that the cardinal …’
Docherty held up his hand. ‘I know it’s a poor solution. But the letter itself is convincing. If the cardinal asks experts – and he will – they’ll tell him that. And then he’ll have to investigate the monsignor. This man your son mentioned in the letter? The other victim. Perhaps we could talk to him. He may even offer corroboration.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Liz bleakly. ‘But you see how it’s all going for that poor young scientist. Catholic lawyers tell me the Church fights dirtier than any corporation. Catholic lawyers say it. Did you read that the dead priest’s sister is saying Devitt threw himself at that mongrel Guest? Did you see that? That’s what happens if you sue the Church.’
